Mark's DeAgostini Skyrider Drone

I've finally made sufficient progress on this to make it worth writing about. The instructions jump about a bit, with doing a bit of a rotor arm here, a motor there, and the odd bit of chassis. However, as I've now got 11 of the 12 parts, I can get on well.

First off, the kit is very good quality, and everything seems to fit very well. The instructions aren't bad, but do make reference to putting a grub screw in the motor rotor where one is already fitted. Otherwise they seem OK. If you read the DeAg Model-Space forum there seem to be a lot of hints and tips that don't seem to be in the instructions, but they only seem relevant once you get to the last pack (which I don't have !!)

I did have a problem where they had sent me a clockwise rotor arms instead of anti-clockwise ones, but a quick email to customer services and they sent replacements which were fine.

First up, I made the chassis with undercarriage.

It all feels a bit flexible at this stage. However, there is a bracket for an action cam which stiffens things up nicely. There is also a top to the chassis which I hope will stiffen things even more.

The arms consist of a glass reinforced plastic arm, LEDs and the motor. Here is the arm and LEDs. Blue LEDs for the front arms, and red for the rear.

The instructions tell you to fit the LEDs before fitting the motor, however, the motor is fitted underneath the LEDs, so best fit the motor first.

Here are the parts that make up the motor assemble. The motor comes as a separate stator and rotor. These are held together with a small circlip which is very fiddly !! Then there is the guard and its base. The rotors come in two flavours, clockwise and anticlockwise. These are identified by black or silver nuts which have a left or right hand thread. The front arms have red guards and the rear have black.

This is what it looks like assembled. The guard just clips in place and is best left till later.

This is the first arm in place. There is a hinged block that is held in place with 4 small self tappers. Then the arm is fixed to the chassis by an M6 bolt with a captive nut. This allows the arms to be folded down for ease of transportation.

Repeat for the remaining arms, taking care to get the right motors and the right LEDs on the right arms.......

Next is fitting the four speed controllers and the LED controller board at the rear. The speed controllers are held down with double sided tape and I do have the chassis top plate. However, the DeAg forum mentioned that there was some 'adjustment' to make not he chassis before fitting the top plate, so I decided to err on the side of caution and not stick the controllers down yet.

This is as far as I can go for now. I have half of the body, but that's the last thing to be fitted anyway. I have the top chassis plate and the front and rear chassis parts, which are held in place by the chassis top plate. There is also a flight controller board, which I think is possibly some of the flight sensors (guessing the compass and altimeter. That is fitted later. Therefore that's about as far as I can go. The last pack must contain the flight computer, GPS, receiver, camera, battery and charger, transmitter, etc. That's going to be a big pack